The war of the future
By Manohar Malgonkar

LATE in the year 1960, as the cold weather was setting in, our newspaper and AIR bulletins regularly carried alarming reports of crossborder provocations by the Portuguese military units stationed along our borders with Goa.

Few people who lived close to Goa believed these reports. I for one didn’t. For one thing I daily met people who were going in and out of Goa, and it was their feeling that the people of Goa were cowering their fear in anticipation of an Indian assault, and that the Army and the police were singularly non-belligerent.

At about the same time, the special correspondent of the London Times, whom his paper had sent to Goa to study the situation on the ground, met me at a friend’s house. He told me that the Portuguese authorities had actually pulled back their border forces well into the interior just to avoid all possibility of contact. He was Mr Heron, who later rose to become Editor the Times.

Early one morning, a jeep stopped in front of my house and three army officers in camouflage parkas hopped out. They had heard that ‘an old army type’ had settled down in these jungles and thought they’d say hello.

It turned out that they had also come to my house in the hope of getting a hot bath. They were camped in the open, and while they had plenty of supplies, they had not had a hot bath in three days. Oh, yes, they had brought up a case of beer. "Thought you’d like it — what with prohibition raging in Karnataka."

That is what used to be called ‘The Old Boy network’. I made it possible for them to take baths whenever they were in the neighbourhood and they helped out with the survival necessities of prohibition paradises. They belonged to a special commando force, charged with stage-managing those ‘intolerable’ crossborder provocations against innocent villagers along our borders. This they achieved by crossing over a few hundred metres into unmanned Goan territory and from there letting off a few hundred rounds of machine-gun fire in the general direction of India.

It was all rather amateurish, but it served its purpose of establishing ‘provocation’. "Just listen to that racket! No wonder the villagers are panicking".

Months after Goa was liberated, I ran into an old college buddy in Bombay, Jummy Nagarwala, who was now a top-ranking policeman. He told me how he was the man who had masterminded the provocations in his area of responsibility, around the Portuguese pockets in Gujarat. He had hugely enjoyed his unusual assignment; spreading alarm and consternation, the antithesis of his proper role as the maintainer of law and order.

These incidents figure in General B.M. Kaul’s autobiography, The Untold Story in their official version:

"We received reports that the Portuguese had been firing at many of the patrols on our side of the borders...(and) their repressive measures against the Goan nationalists went from bad to worse."

Or again: "...this step was taken only after grave provocation."

The ‘step’ was operation ‘Vijay’, the Indian Army’s unopposed takeover of Goa.

The point here is not the rightness or wrongness of taking over Goa, but the fabrication of the provocation in support of a predetermined national goal. Mahatma Gandhi may have demurred. But no one else.

All countries are in the habit of issuing official statements which are spin-doctered to justify national policies, which, too, as often as not depend on the will or prejudices of one man, the head of state. So when, in August 1998, President Clinton decided to plaster Afghanistan with missile attacks, it was done, so Bill Clinton told the world, as a retaliatory measure against a sinister enemy, Bin Laden who was "a threat to our national security".

Really? What had he done to threaten America’s security?

Why, wasn’t he the man behind those truck bombings of the US embassies in Dar es Salam and Nairobi? The US intelligence have proof. So they say.

They must be right then, except that these situation reports concocted by American Intelligence agencies too are spin-doctored to fit in with presidential decisions.

Remember that time when President Lyndon Johnson decided to escalate the US involvement of American units in Vietnam into full-fledged war? He told the world that it had become necessary because the North Vietnamese had sent a gunboat into the Gulf of Tonkin?

There was no such gunboat in the Gulf of Tonkin. In any case not many Americans could have cared if there was one. But it was cause enough for a bitter and bloody war which went on for years and years and from which the Americans had to pull out as a defeated army.

But if that imaginary gunboat in some distant gulf seems an absurdly flimsy reason to go to war against a people who have done your country no harm, what about the logic behind the war that the west wing of Pakistan declared against its East wing?

What had the Bengalis done to provoke that war?

They had won the majority of seats in the national elections — that’s what. And thereby offended the Military Junta. The Military Dictator of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, told his people in a national broadcast that Mujib-ur-Rehman "was a traitor. He has defied authority, insulted the Pakistani flag, he has desecrated the picture of the founder of the nation."

O.K. The last two reasons in Yahya’s charge-sheet may well be death-penalty crimes in Pakistan. But what about that bit about Mujib "defying authority"? Danmit! — Mujib himself, by overwhelming popular vote, was the ultimate authority in Pakistan, no matter in what wing. There just was no one higher than him whose authority he was said to have flouted.

But what is logic to dictators? So Yahya, at the precise hour of midnight on March 26, 1971, unleashed on the eastern wing of his own country, military operation codenamed Search Light. Its object, to bring the ‘Bingos’ to their knees by terror tactics.

But the Bengalis just refused to buckle down as the Military Junta that headed Pakistan had anticipated. Instead they fought back with such virulence that Yahya had to send in more and more troops and weapons to keep the tempo going. In the end they were hopelessly bogged down in the water-logged terrain of Eastern Bengal. That was then Indira Gandhi, in what was obviously the most inspired action of her regime, sent in the Indian Army to fight on the side of the Bengali troops. The Indians finished off the war in a few masterly lightening strikes. Thirteen days, and it was all over.

The entire Pakistani army that had been sent to the East Wing had to submit to an unconditional surrender, and ended up as Prisoners of War. The intense bitterness that had been built up between the citizens of two wings of the same nations is reflected in the special plea that the Pakistani Army Commander, General Niazi, ‘Tiger’, Niazi, made to his Indian counterpart. That it should be the Indians who should accept the surrender of his troops and not the Bangla Deshis, and that, after their surrender, none of them should be handed over to their own ex-nationals for being tried as war criminals.

That too, was a military adventure that ended up in a disaster — on the scale of America’s defeat in Viet Nam.

And now we have that Tomhawk barrage into Afghanistan, which Bill Clinton declared had been made because of a threat to "national security", and which, his Secretary of State, Madeline Albright has told us: "This is, unfortunately, the war of the future.""

Prophetic words? — and does that mean that Bin Laden and his agents and allies are actually thinking in terms of a war? This lady, Madam Albright, chooses her words with care.